


The Snows of Yesterday

by MJ (mjr91)



Category: Boston Legal
Genre: M/M, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-25
Updated: 2012-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-04 07:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paul Lewiston reminisces about his life and career, and why he cannot tolerate Alan Shore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Snows of Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> The title from translation of Francois Villon's famous "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" - or, "where are the snows of yesterday?" It's all about the nostalgia.

I look out of the interior window in my office, into the corridor. One function of age is that the young lawyers I see in the office seem so much younger than they were when we were the same age. Was I ever as young as some of our associates are? Certainly not when I left law school.

The young are so much younger, and so much more... ill-mannered? Uninhibited? Unrepressed? I have no idea what to call it, really; I only know that when we were that age, we would never have dared... never even have dreamed... well, perhaps Denny Crane might have. Denny is a force of nature, and always has been. Not just any force of nature, I might add; when he is in truly rare form, he's the human equivalent of a tsunami.

I have never been so brazen as Denny Crane, in any way or regarding any matter. When I was a boy, we were taught to be quiet, decorous, circumspect. I recognize that Denny and I had vastly different upbringings, yes. I am my parents' child, raised, I suppose, to a gentility and a form of American aristocracy that passed out of being a generation ago. I was born to a nursery of sterling rattles and drinking cups, china baby dishes, and long linen robes, graduating to short pants and bow ties a few years later, with someone to call me "young master Paul" when I was going beyond my limit of tolerable behavior.

My own child didn't have that; my wife thought such child rearing silly and outmoded. Yet it did us a world of good to be raised to understand tradition and duty, and my daughter and my grandchild are far the worse for our failing to raise my daughter to take responsibility for our share of the earth's goods.

And the younger lawyers here - Shirley is an exception, but she's not young herself, and she is of what I fear is the last generation of those of us who were raised to responsibility and to social duty. I have no sentiment against a woman over a decade younger than I having her name on the door of this firm when I do not - I came to it later, a lateral move from my prior firm, and Shirley worked to build this firm to where it is today, the reason I begged her to come back and to take the public reins while I run the administrative end. The rest, the young ones... they lack decorum, they lack dignity, they lack common sense about the conduct of their lives, both personally and professionally. I except Denise, who has her own personal issues but has rarely let them interfere with her professional reputation.

I do not except Alan Shore. The man makes my blood curdle. If he were not Denny's... shall I say "protégé" ... he would not be here. His behavior is scandalous, professionally unethical, and personally outrageous. That Denny should have gravitated to him is perhaps inevitable; Denny is the same as Alan is, but I have to accept that my great and good friend elevated indecorousness to an art form decades ago. Every lawyer must have his image, and Denny chose to be the flamboyant playboy, flashing his money, his romances, and his courtroom antics to the world, and turning it all into yet more success. I prefer my own success to be more modest; I was raised to think virtue its own reward, and I still believe it to be true. An extra million dollars means nothing to me; I would rather have my morning tea on a summer day on the porch of my beach cottage on the Cape, watching the waves roll and a lazy cat absorbing a sunbeam. Denny may have the money.

But then, as I mentioned, Denny was raised differently than I was, and Alan, a Dedham boy, was raised even further from my own pedigree - in the Sixties, in the home town of Sacco and Vanzetti, by - my class-conscious background bothers me, but it is there and I must acknowledge it - a very middle-class family, and to the best of my knowledge in its public schools.

I should never have allowed my wife to follow her classless-society dream of sending our daughter to the public schools. We were products of private schools, Andover and Rosemary Hall, and it stood us in good stead in later years. Alan and my daughter are two examples of what public schools are capable of doing to the human soul and intellect, in my opinion.

Andover was an all-boys' school when I attended. It certainly is not a boys' school any more. I could have sent my daughter there, if my wife and I had not been at loggerheads on the direction of American education. But when I was there, no young ladies graced the classrooms.

It wouldn't have made any difference if they had. There were certain things I knew about myself even then, things that I discovered I had in common with some of the other boys. Our admiration of our team's quarterback was one of them... and I do not reference an ordinary hero worship. He was a great player and a fine athlete, but he was also the subject of a good many of our stray thoughts... and possibly of some of our actions, when alone in bed or in the bathrooms. I'm sure you take my meaning; I am well aware of the modern vernacular, but I can't say that I approve of it. English was not meant to be mangled for the discussion of any subject.

Some of the other boys were more daring; I listened to their exploits occasionally, more afraid of being caught if I ever tried such things with anyone else than I was curious about broadening my experience to match my interests. I wasn't so fearful for myself, as for how my family would take such news. Once upon a time, one didn't do such things to their family. Drug addicts used to go to Paris to live in garrets and wire home every so often for money; our sort, if they were determined to risk themselves, headed to New York to go into writing, or went to London or Paris to go into art, partly for adventure, partly for anonymity. One doesn't have that in Boston, or didn't back then.

I have always been risk-averse. It suits my temperament, and it suits my international clients. The Asian markets require that kind of approach. Denny and I have always worked well together because we're opposites. But I digress.

I finally took my risk in my junior year of college. Eric and I were fraternity brothers, and then roommates at the fraternity house. Eventually, we were more than that. It ended during my first year of law school. He decided to finish his graduate work at Stanford, and there was precious little that could be done about anything. I needed to concentrate on my legal studies as it was, so at the time it was all for the best. Eric lives near San Diego now; he has a beautiful home, a second wife, and two sets of grandchildren. I see him at reunions and occasionally at seminars on Japanese corporate issues. We trade stories about work and a few tall tales over drinks, but there are some things one simply does not discuss. Some doors do not need to be opened once you've closed them.

After law school, I went into my first associate position, and then married. That was the thing to do then. Everyone married, whether for love, or for an outlet, or for money, or for the need to fit in. Fitting in was important then. A single associate, unable to invite the partners to his home for dinner, or to have his wife play hostess at a bridge match, or to bring her to a firm event, did not fit in, did not become a senior associate, and did not make partner. The slightest suggestion that one was single for any reason other than either bad luck or exceptional luck with women could end a career. I was not about to end mine.

I was luckier than some men I knew. I had known my wife since school; I saw her, every summer, at my parents' club. She was pretty, she was popular, but she also hid one of the best minds I have ever known, and she was very well read, even then. Her father had corporate connections in Taiwan, and he was kind enough to take me on one of his business trips to Taipei the summer after my first year in law school. Our families were friends; we were friends. I was fortunate enough to be genuinely fond of my wife, which made the situation easier for both of us. Equally fortunately, she lost much of her interest in more intimate activities after our daughter was born, which took a great deal of pressure off of me.

It would surprise my younger colleagues to realize that I was faithful to her - regardless of who might have been chosen for any indiscretions. Very little value is placed on fidelity any more. But fidelity is a mark of respect, as well as of affection. She kept our home, kept up with me... which in my younger days was no mean feat, given my schedule... and she took an interest in Asian art and in Asian cooking which made my Asian clients feel at home and our friends anxious for dinner invitations. She raised our daughter virtually single-handedly, as I was so often not home, and despite all of that, still found time to do some very worthwhile volunteer work. 

I honestly think her work schedule, as one might think of it, was harder than mine, and no one wrote her a check at the end of the week. I owed her a great deal more than simply paying the bills and approving her dresses; I owed her my respect for what she contributed to my career, and for what she did raising our child and maintaining our status in the community. Such things mattered once. We no longer value homemaking, do we?

And so I did no less than she deserved. I called if I was running late, I came home at night, no matter how late, unless trial preparation forced me to stay in town. I warned her of dinner guests in time for her to make arrangements, I remembered her birthday and our anniversary, and I never scrimped on vacations with her. Even in the first few years, and even if other finances were tight, as they were when we started, I took her away for the weekend for her birthday, bought her jewelry on our anniversaries, and we took two vacations a year. 

And I gave her no occasion to wonder if there was anyone else. I never took my secretary or my female clients to dinner, only to lunch. I turned down most after-work events that were not extended to her as well as to me. I always gave her my room number at hotels, and the hotel phone number, if I was away, and I called her every day from wherever I was.

I was dimly aware of colleagues who occasionally hired young men for certain activities. I always thought it a bit uncouth, and of course at the time, some of these young gentlemen ran a small business in blackmail on the side, which was something I certainly wanted no part of. I heard tales of other professional men who had solicited, or had been solicited, for various acts in public men's rooms. Even the versions that did not conclude with the gentlemen being arrested by undercover police struck me as slightly sordid. All of it was a world apart from my time with Eric, and I wanted no part of it.

My wife was ill for a very long time before she died. And at that point, it would hardly have been right, in the least, for me to indulge myself anywhere else. Besides, there seems to be a premium in certain circles, so to speak, for younger, attractive, men. I am not one of them, and it offends me, as I say, to pay for the privilege of meeting them. What I cannot come by honestly is something I do not choose to have.

Denny Crane is another matter. When what were once called the Swinging Sixties arrived in America, Denny took the concept to heart. It suited him to become a playboy, and as his close friends discovered, when Denny Crane swung, it was in any direction he could reach. The public saw the pretty girls. His colleagues saw the beginning of the parade of wives and female companions. His friends saw it all - and, if they were unfortunate enough, somehow wound up participating. Shirley, alas, is perhaps the expert on the subject.

I realized back then that Denny's appetites encompassed more than food, alcohol, and women. The men, however, were never something that he advertised, and they seemed not to be particularly frequent, but they were there.

Someone who never knew Denny then can barely imagine him as he was. He was a very attractive man, extremely charismatic; ready with a joke, a drink, or any money you might need or want. In court, he was riveting; in public, he was magnetic; in private, you couldn't help watching him. The possibility of our friendship moving elsewhere on the scale crossed my mind more than once at that time, but my duty to my wife and my fear of Denny's publicity buried such ideas almost as quickly as they arose. And, as such things do, the badly placed interest wore itself out - but not, I think, before Denny had noticed.

I will say one thing for Denny - he has an enormous capacity for friendship when he chooses to exercise it. The matter is something he has never mentioned, never used against me. He has certainly had the opportunity to do so if he pleased.

And then... then there is Alan Shore. As I have said, the younger generation has no sense of discretion, no sense of decorum. Men who used to be open about their proclivities once refrained, outside of their own circles, from swooning over Garland, Minnelli, and Streisand. Men didn't gloat about conquests of either gender - or both - and particularly not when one of those conquests was their supervisor in any way.

It may have been Denny's comment at the water cooler that filled all of us in, through the gossip mill, about his relationship with Alan - not that Shirley and I hadn't had our well-founded suspicions. But it is Alan who has all but hired skywriters to announce it to the public, to reinforce it to the office, to... to... well, I understand that Alan and Denny recently made some sort of inappropriate comment to the judge alluding to their liaison. And... er... flamingos. 

Alan's behavior is absolutely abominable. Any lawyer deserving of working in this profession should have the decency to conduct his private affairs with more decorum - especially when he simply is not Denny Crane.

But that sort of... overt... blatant... sexual revelation... seems to be permissible now, unfortunately. There are no standards any more.

There are, apparently, no closets any more.

Yet it is far too late for some of us to be anywhere other than where we have always lived.

Alan is brash, he is outrageous, he is conspicuous - both in his work and in his life. He is, I fear, what many of us would have been, had we been given the opportunity, the license, to be ourselves and not the people our families wanted us to be. He has chosen his own path, and has managed to make it work for him.

I have spent a lifetime trying to make myself content with a hand I believed I was dealt. Alan has dealt his own cards, and at least in his personal affairs, he has turned up a hand that satisfies him completely. His openness about his affection for Denny is his ace in the hole. It is the sort of luxury I can never know, and he flaunts it as casually as the secretaries show off their new handbags.

And for that, I can never forgive him.


End file.
